A Shared Connection

So we are getting ready to head to the beach. 18+ hours in the car with the kids - and only my laptop will have an internet connection.

That is great for me - but how are the kids going to surf the web and keep up with IM while on the road. We won't have an internet connection for them at the beach, or the following week in Vermont.

So what is the answer? Share my laptop. NO WAY! But I am willing to share my EVDO high speed wireless connection.

I played with this a while back, but had nothing but problems getting it set up. It ended up totally messing up all of my connections.

So I figured that if I am going to give it a shot, I better play before we hit the road so that I will have some time to recover if necessary.

I found this excellent post months ago, just have not taken the time to give it a try.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/expert/bowman_02april08.mspx

Boy, it looks simple. But wasn't this what I tried on my own without instructions before?

Well, I gave it a shot and it worked right out of the gate. When I then turned on WEP, it crapped out and I could not get it back up. So tear it down, put it back to original, reboot and try once more.

Well this time it worked. WEP and all.

We will see how it holds up over the next two weeks on the road. Should be OK, as long as they don't try to download the current Harry Potter movie off torrent ;-)

iLike

O.K. - I'm addicted. Well not really, but this was really fun. iLike is an add-in to facebook that allows you to play a game. Plays clips of songs and you have to guess the artist or title. I did not do so well with the current bands - but whenever some classic rock popped up - well - I ROCKED!

They are adding a contest by genre soon. That will let me rack up points really fast.

Saw a writeup on iLike on Techcrunch and figured I would give it a spin. They have signed up 3+ million users in the past couple months. A viral success for sure. Not sure what their business model is - but will have to dig in later.

Also, speaking about music, played a couple months ago with Pandora. You give this service some bands/songs you like and it then streams music to your tastes. I had tried a couple of these in the past and they were spotty at best at finding music I like. This one was dead on.

Give it a spin!!

FaceBook or LinkedIn?

OK, so they really are different products, and for now I'm hedging my bet and participating in both. But this was an interesting article on TechCrunch about where they are heading and what it means for networking.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/13/linkedin-traffic-up-but-is-it-enough/

Will be interesting to follow both.

Pattern Recognition

Today I listened to a podcast from Defcon by Dan Kaminsky on how ISPs are shutting down individuals due to usage levels, SSL problems and how he was able to hack DNS. All interesting stuff, but the cream was in his description of pattern recognition in hex data.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=Dan+Kaminsky+pattern+recognition

This was really cool. He talked about a tool that takes chucks of file data (programs, MP3's, etc.) and looks for matching patterns and then displays it visually. He talked about how our brains can't remember unstructured stuff (strings of data and unrelated words), but can remember names and patterns.

His use for this was to look for patterns in programs that he can fuzz or look for changes in versions of a program. Very cool.

I need to think about how this might be used to recognize patterns in statistical data in my job.

Amazing how stuff from left field seems to apply to what I do on a daily basis...

Time to get this started

I've decided to try to get some thoughts out of my brain and down in bits and bytes....

Some stuff I have been doing lately:

Listened to some podcasts from the last Defcon. So far there have been some very interesting topics. Yesterday, I listened to one on "bumping" locks. Very scary. I thought that when we locked our house at night - we were safe. But after this listen - I know better. Time to upgrade the locks.

Today listened to creating rootkits and viruses within Oracle. Since I work so much with Oracle, this all made sense. Again, frightening that there are so many ways to create a backdoor.

Finally, I just read Techcrunch for the first time. Very interesting blog on new tech start ups. Looks like it will be worth a daily read.